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r* LETTER TO 
AMERICAN 
WORKINGMEN 

From the Socialist Soviet Republic of Russia 



By N. LENIN 



Reprinted from THE CLASS STRUGGLE' 

December, 1918 



Price --- 5 Cents 



NEW YORK 
THE SOCIALIST PUBLICATION SOCIETY 

431 PULASKI ST., BROOKLYN, N. Y. 

December. 1918 



I J loan 






A Letter to American Workingmen 

By N. Lenin. 

Moscow, August 20, 1918. 

Comrades: A Russian Bolshevik who participated in the 
Revolution of 1905 and for many years afterwards lived in your 
country has offered to transmit this letter to you. I have 
grasped this opportunity joyfully for the revolutionary prole- 
tariat of America — insofar as it is the enemy of American im- 
perialism — is destined to perform an important task at this 
time. 

The history of modern civilized America opens with one of 
those really revolutionary wars of liberation of which there 
have been so few compared with the enormous number of 
wars of conquest that were caused, like the present imperial- 
istic war, by squabbles among kings, landholders and capital- 
ists over the division of ill-gotten lands and profits. It was 
a war of the American people against the English who de- 
spoiled America of its resources and held in colonial subjec- 
tion, just as their "civilized" descendants are draining the life- 
blood of hundreds of millions of human beings in India, Egypt 
and all corners and ends of the world to keep them in sub- 
jection. 

Since that war 150 years have passed. Bourgeois civilization 
has born its most luxuriant fruit. By developing the produc- 

3 



tive forces of organized human labor, by utilizing machines 
and all the wonders of technique America has taken the first 
place among free and civilized nations. But at the same time 
America, like a few other nations, has become characteristic 
for the depth of the abyss that divide a handful of brutal mil- 
lionaires who are stagnating in a mire of luxury, and millions 
of laboring starving men and women who are always staring 
want in the face. 

Four years of imperialistic slaughter have left their trace. 
Irrefutably and clearly events have shown to the people that 
both imperialistic groups, the English as well as the German, 
have been playing false. The four years of war have shown in 
their effects the great law of capitalism in all wars ; that he 
who is richest and mightiest profits the most, takes the great- 
est share of the spoils while he who is weakest is exploited, 
martyred, oppressed and outraged to the utmost. 

In the number of its colonial possessions, English imperial- 
ism has always been more powerful than any of the other 
countries. England has lost not a span of its "acquired" land. 
On the other hand it has acquired control of all German colonies 
in Africa, has occupied Mesopotamia and Palestine. 

German imperialism was stronger because of the wonderful 
organization and ruthless discipline of "its" armies, but as far 
as colonies are concerned, is much weaker than its opponent. 
It has now lofet all of its colonies, but has robbed half of 
Europe and throttled most of the small countries and weaker 
peoples.. What a high conception of "liberation" on either side! 
How well they have defended their fatherlands, these "gentle- 
men" of both groups, the Anglo-French and the German cap- 
italists together with their lackeys, the Social-Patriots. 

American plutocrats are wealthier than those of any other 
country partly because they are geographically more favor- 
ably situated. They have made the greatest profits. They 
have made all, even the weakest countries, their debtors. 
They have amassed gigantic fortunes during the war. And 

l 



every dollar is stained with the blood that was shed by mil- 
lions of murdered and crippled men, shed in the high, honor- 
able and holy war of freedom. 

Had the Anglo-French and American bourgeoisie accepted 
the Soviet invitation , to participate in peace negotiations at 
Brest-Litovsk, instead of leaving Russia to the mercy of brutal 
Germany a just peace without annexations and indemnities, a 
peace based upon complete equality could have been forced 
upon Germany, and millions of lives might have been saved. 
Because they hoped to reestablish the Eastern Front by once 
more drawing us into the whirlpool of warfare, they refused to 
attend peace negotiations and gave Germany a free hand to 
cram its shameful terms down the throat of the Russian 
people. It lay in the power of. the Allied countries to make the 
Brest-Litovsk negotiations the forerunner of a general peace. 
It ill becomes them to throw the blame for the Russo-German 
peace upon our shoulders ! 

The workers of the whole world, in whatever country they 
may live, rejoice with us and sympathize with us, applaud us 
for having burst the iron ring of imperialistic agreements and 
treaties, for having dreaded no sacrifice, however great, to free 
ourselves, for having established ourselves as a socialist repub- 
lic, even so rent asunder and plundered by German imperial- 
ists, for having raised the banner of peace, the banner of 
Socialism over the world. What wonder that, we are hated 
by the capitalist class the world over. But this hatred of 
imperialism and the sympathy of the class-conscious workers 
of all countries give us assurance of the righteousness of our 
cause. 

He is no Socialist who cannot understand that one cannot 
and must not hesitate to bring even that greatest of sacrifice, 
the sacrifice of territory, that one must be ready to accept even 
military defeat at the hands of imperialism in the interests of 
victory over the bourgeoisie, in the interests of a transfer of 
power to the working-class. For the sake of "their" cause, 
that is for the conquest of world-power, the imperialists of 



England and Germany have not hesitated to ruin a whole of 
row of nations, from Belgium and Servia to Palestine and Me- 
sopotamia. Shall we then hesitate to act in the name of the 
liberation of the workers of the world from the yoke of capital- 
ism, in the name of a general honorable peace; shall , we wait 
until we can find a way that entails no sacrifice ; shall we be 
afraid to begin the fight until an easy victory is assured ; shall 
we place the integrity and safety of this "fatherland" created 
by the bourgeoisie over the interests of the international so- 
cialist revolution? 

We have been attacked for coming to terms with German 
militarism. Is there no difference between a pact entered upon 
by Socialists and a bourgeoisie (native or foreign) against the 
working-class, against labor, and an agreement that is made 
between a working-class that has overthrown its own bour- 
geoisie and a bourgeoisie of one side against a bourgeoisie of 
another nationality for the protection of the proletariat? Shall 
we not exploit the antagonism that exists between the various 
groups of the bourgeoisie. In reality every European under- 
stands this difference, and the American people, as I will pres- 
ently show, have had a very similar experience in its own his- 
tory. There are agreements and agreements, fagots et fagots, 
as the Frenchman says. 

When the robber-barons of German imperialism threw their 
armies into defenseless, demobilized Russia in February 1918, 
when Russia had staked its hopes upon the international soli- 
darity of the proletariat before the international revolution had 
completely ripened, I did not hesitate for a moment to come 
to certain agreements with French Monarchists. The French 
captain Sadoul, who sympathized in words with the Bolshe- 
viki while in deeds he was the faithful servant of French im- 
perialism, brought the French officer de Lubersac to me. "I 
am a Monarchist. My only purpose is the overthrow of Ger- 
many," de Lubersac declared to me. "That is self understood 
(cela va sans dire)," I replied. But this by no means prevented 
me from coming to an understanding with de Lubersac con- 



cerning certain services that French experts in explosives were 
ready to render in order to hold up the German advance by the 
destruction of railroad lines. This is an example of the kind of 
agreement that every class-conscious worker must be ready to 
adopt, an agreement in the interest of Socialism. We shook 
hands with the French Monarchists although we knew that 
each one of us would rather have seen the other hang. But 
temporarily our interests were identical. To throw back the 
rapacious advancing German army we made use of the equally 
greedy interests of their opponents, thereby serving the inter- 
ests of the Russian and the international socialist revolution. 

In this way we furthered the cause of the working-class of 
Russia and of other countries; in this way we strengthened the 
proletariat and weakened the bourgeoisie of the world by mak- 
ing use of the usual and absolutely legal practice of manoever- 
ing, shifting and waiting for the moment the rapidly growing 
proletarian revolution in the more highly developed nations 
had ripened. 

Long ago the American people used these tactics to the ad- 
vantage of its revolution. When America waged its great 
war of liberation against the English oppressors, it likewise 
entered into negotiations with other oppressors, with the 
French and the Spaniards who at that time owned a consider- 
able portion of what is now the United States. In its desper-' 
ate struggle for freedom the American people made "agree- 
ments" with one group of oppressors against the other for the 
purpose of weakening all oppressors and strengthening those 
who were struggling against tyranny. The American people 
utilized the antagonism that existed between the English and 
the French, at times even fighting side by side with the armies 
of one group of oppressors, the French and the Spanish against 
the others, the English. Thus it vanquished first the English 
and then freed itself (partly by purchase) from the dangerous 
proximity of the French and Spanish possessions. 

The great Russian revolutionist Tchernychewski once said: 
Political activity is not as smooth as the pavement of the 

7 



Nevski Prospect. He is no revolutionist who would have the 
revolution of the proletariat only under the "condition" that it 
proceed smoothly and in an orderly manner, that guarantees 
against defeat be given beforehand, that the revolution go for- 
ward along the broad, free, straight path to victory, that there 
shall not be here and there the heaviest sacrifices, that we 
shall not have to lie in wait in besieged fortresses, shall not 
have to climb up along the narrowest path, the most impassi- 
ble, winding, dangerous mountain roads. He is no revolution- 
ist, he has not yet freed himself from the pendantry of bour- 
geois intellectualism, he will fall back, again and again, into the 
camp of the counter-revolutionary bourgeoisie. 

They are little more than imitators of the bourgeoisie, these 
gentlemen who delight in holding up to us the "chaos" of rev- 
olution, the "destruction" of industry, the unemployment, the 
lack of food. Can there be anything more hypocritical than 
such accusations from people who greeted and supported the 
imperialistic war and made common cause with Kerensky 
when he continued the war? Is not this imperialistic war the 
cause of all our misfortune? The revolution that was born by 
the war must necessarily go on through the terrible difficul- 
ties and sufferings that war created, through this heritage of 
destruction and reactionary mass murder. To accuse ,us of 
"destruction" of industries and "terror" is hypocrisy or clumsy 
pedantry, sho*vs an incapability of understanding the most ele- 
mental fundamentals of the raging, climatic force of the class 
struggle, called Revolution. 

In words our accusers "recognize" this kind of class 
struggle, in deeds they revert again and again to the middle 
class Utopia of "class-harmony" and the mutual "interdepend- 
ence" of classes upon one another. In reality the class 
struggle in revolutionary times has always inevitably taken on 
the form of civil war, and civil war is unthinkable without the 
worst kind of destruction, without terror and limitations of 
form of democracy in the interests of the war. One must be a 
sickly sentimentalist not to be able to see, to understand and 



appreciate this necessity. Only the Tchechov type of the life- 
less "Man in the Box" can denounce the Revolution for this 
reason instead of throwing himself into the fight with the 
whole vehemence and decision of his soul at a moment 
when history demands that the highest problems of humanity 
be solved by struggle and war. 

The best representatives of the American proletariat — 
those representatives who have repeatedly given expression to 
their full solidarity with us, the Bolsheviki, are the expression 
of this revolutionary tradition in the life of the American 
people. This tradition originated in the war of liberation 
against the English in the 18th and the Civil War in the 19th 
century. Industry and commerce in 1870 were in a much 
worse position than in 1860. But where can you find 
an American so pendantic, so absolutely idiotic who would deny 
the revolutionary and progressive significance of the American 
Civil War of 1860-1865? 

The representatives of the bourgeoisie understand very well 
that the overthrow of slavery was well worth the three years 
of Civil War, the depth of destruction, devastation and terror 
that were its accompaniment. But these same gentlemen and 
the reform socialists who have allowed themselves to be cowed 
by the bourgeoisie and tremble at the thought of a revolution, 
cannot, nay will not, see the necessity and righteousness of a 
civil war in Russia, though it is facing a far greater task, the 
work of abolishing capitalist wage slavery and overthrowing 
the rule of the bourgeoisie. 

The American working class will not follow the lead of its 
bourgeoisie. It will go with us against the bourgeoisie. The 
whole history of the American people gives me this confidence, 
this conviction. I recall with pride the words of one of the 
best loved leaders of the American proletariat, Eugene V. 
Debs, who said in the "Appeal to Reason" at the end of 1915, 
when it was still a socialist paper, in an article entitled "Why 
Should I Fight?" that he would rather be shot than vote for war 
credits to support the present criminal and reactionary war, 



that he knows only one war that is sanctified and justified from 
the standpoint of the proletariat: the war against the capital- 
ist class, the war for the liberation of mankind from wage 
slavery. I am not surprised that this fearless man was thrown 
into prison by the American bourgeoisie. Let them brutalize 
true internationalists, the real representatives of the revolu- 
tionary proletariat. The greater the bitterness and brutality 
they sow, the nearer is the day of the victorious proletarian 
revolution. 

We are accused of having brought devastation upon Russia. 
Who is it that makes these accusations? The train-bearers of 
the bourgeoisie, of that same bourgeoisie that almost com- 
pletely destroyed the culture of Europe, that has dragged the 
whole continent back to barbarism, that has brought hunger 
and destruction to the world. This bourgeoisie now demands 
that we find a different basis for our Revolution than that of 
destruction, that we shall not build it up upon the ruins of war, 
with human beings degraded and brutalized by years of war- 
fare. O, how human, how just is this bourgeoisie ! 

Its servants charge us with the use of terroristic methods. — 
Have the English forgotten their 1649, the French their 
1793? Terror was just and justified when it was employed by 
the bourgeoisie for its own purposes against feudal domina- 
tion. But terror becomes criminal when workingmen and 
poverty stricken peasants dare to use it against the bour- 
geoisie. Terror was just and justified when it was used to put 
one exploiting minority in the place of another. But terror 
becomes horrible and criminal when it is used to abolish all ex- 
ploiting minorities, when it is employed in the cause of the ac- 
tual majority, in the cause of the proletariat and the semi-pro- 
letariat, of the working-class and the poor peasantry. 

The bourgeoisie of international imperalism has succeeded 
in slaughtering 10 millions, in crippling 20 millions in its war. 
Should our war, the war of the oppressed and the exploited, 
against oppressors and exploiters cost a half or a whole million 
victims in all countries, the bourgeoisie would still maintain 

10 



that the victims of the world war died a righteous death, that 
those of the civil war were sacrificed for a criminal cause. 

But the proletariat, even now, in the midst of the horrors of 
war, is learning the great truth that all revolutions teach, the 
truth that has been handed down to us by our best teachers, 
the founders of modern Socialism. From them we have 
learned that a successful revolution is inconceivable unless it 
breaks the resistance of the exploiting class. When the work- 
ers and the laboring peasants took hold of the powers of state, 
it became our duty to quell the resistance of the exploiting 
class. We are proud that we have done it, that we are doing 
it. We only regret that we did not do it, at the beginning, 
with sufficient firmness and decision. 

We realize that the mad resistance of the bourgeoisie against 
the socialist revolution in all countries is unavoidable. We 
know too, that with the development of this revolution, this 
resistance will grow. But the proletariat will break down 
this resistance and in the course of its struggle against the 
bourgeoisie the proletariat will finally become ripe for victory 
and power. 

Let the corrupt bourgeois press trumpet every mistake that 
is made by our Revolution out into the world. We are not 
afraid of our mistakes. The beginning of the revolution has not 
sanctified humanity. It is not to be expected that the working 
classes who have been exploited and forcibly held down by 
the clutches of want, of ignorance and degradation for cen- 
turies should conduct its revolution without mistakes. The dead 
body of bourgeois society cannot simply be put into a coffin 
and buried. It rots in our midst, poisons the air we breathe, 
pollutes our lives, clings to the new, the fresh, the living with 
a thousand threads and tendrils of old customs, of death and 
decay. 

But for every hundred of our mistakes that are heralded in- 
to the world by the bourgeoisie and its sycophants, there are 
ten thousand great deeds of heroism, greater and more heroic 



because they seem so simple and unpretentious, because they 
take place in the everyday life of the factory districts or in se- 
cluded villages, because they are the deeds of people who are 
not in the habit of proclaiming their every success to the 
world, who have no opportunity to do so. 

But even if the contrary were true, — I know, of course, that 
this is not so — but even if we had committed 10,000 mistakes 
to every 100 wise and righteous deeds, yes, even then our re- 
volution would be great and invincible. And it will go down 
in the history of the world as unconquerable. For the first 
time in the history of the world not the minority, not alone the 
rich and the educated, but the real masses, the huge majority 
of the working-class itself, are building up a new world, are 
deciding the most difficult questions of social organization 
from out of their own experience. 

Every mistake that is made in this work, in this honestly 
conscientious cooperation of ten million plain workingmen 
and peasants in the re-creation of their entire lives — every 
such mistake is worth thousands and millions of "faultless" 
successes of the exploiting minority, in outwitting and taking 
advantage of the laboring masses. For only through these 
mistakes can the workers and peasants learn to organize their 
new existence, to get along without the capitalist class. Only 
thus will they Be able to blaze their way, through thousands 
of hindrances to victorious socialism. 

Mistakes are being made by our peasants who, at one stroke, 
in the night from October 25 to October 26, (Russian Calen- 
dar) 1917, did away with all private ownership of land, and 
are now struggling, from month to month, under the greatest 
difficulties, to correct their own mistakes, trying to solve in 
practice the most difficult problems of organizing a new so- 
cial state, fighting against profiteers to secure the possession 
of the land for the worker instead of for the speculator, to car- 
ry on agricultural production under a system of communist 
farming on a large scale. 

Mistakes are being made by our workmen in their revolu- 

12 



tionary activity, who, in a few short months, have placed prac- 
tically all of the larger factories and workers under state 
ownership, and are now learning, from day to day, under the 
greatest difficulties, to conduct the management of entire in- 
dustries, to reorganize industries already organized, to over- 
come the deadly resistance of laziness and middle-class reac- 
tion and egotism. Stone upon stone they are building the 
foundation for a new social community, the self-discipline of 
labor, the new rule of the labor organizations of the working- 
class over their members. 

Mistakes are being made in their revolutionary activity by 
the Soviets which were first created in 1905 by the gigantic 
upheaval of the masses. The Workmen's and Peasant's Soviets 
are a new type of state, a new highest form of Democracy, 
a particular form of the dictatorship of the proletariat, a mode 
of conducting the business of the state without the bourgeoisie 
and against the bourgeoisie. For the first time democracy is 
placed at the service of the masses, of the workers, and ceases 
to be a democracy for the rich, as it is, in the last analysis, in 
all capitalist, yes, in all democratic republics. For the first 
time the masses of the people, in a nation of hundreds of 
millions, are fulfilling the task of realizing the dictatorship of 
the proletariat and the semi-proletariat, without which social- 
ism is not to be thought of. 

Let incurable pedants, crammed full of bourgeois democrat- 
ic and parliamentary prejudices, shake their heads gravely 
over our Soviets, let them deplore the fact that we have no 
direct elections. These people have forgotten nothing, have 
learned nothing in the great upheaval of 1914-1918. The com- 
bination of the dictatorship of the proletariat with the new 
democracy of the proletariat, of civil war with the widest ap- 
plication of the masses to political problems, such a combina- 
tion cannot be achieved in a day, cannot be forced into the 
battered forms of formal parliamentary democratism. In the 
Soviet Republic there arises before us a new world, the world 
of Socialism. Such a world cannot be materialized as if by 



magic, complete in every detail, as Minerva sprang from Jupi- 
ter's head. 

While the old bourgeoisie democratic constitutions, for in- 
stance, proclaimed formal equality and the right of free as- 
semblage, the constitution of the Soviet Republic repudiates 
the hypocrisy of a formal equality of all human beings. When 
the bourgeoisie republicans overturned feudal thrones, they 
did not recognize the rules of formal equality of monarchists. 
Since we here are concerned with the task of overthrowing 
the bourgeoisie, only fools or traitors will insist on the formal 
equality of the bourgeoisie. The right of free assemblage is 
not worth an iota to the workman and to the peasant when all 
better meeting places are in the hands of the bourgeoisie. Our 
Soviets have taken over all usable buildings in the cities and 
towns out of the hands of the rich and have placed them at the 
disposal of the worknien and peasants for meeting and organi- 
zation purposes. That is how our right of assemblage looks — 
for the workers. That is the meaning and content of our Soviet, 
of our socialist constitution. 

And for this reason we are all firmly convinced that the Sov- 
iet Republic, whatever misfortune may still lie in store for it, 
is unconquerable. 

It is unconquerable because every blow that comes from the 
powers of madly raging imperialism, every new attack by the 
international bourgeoisie will bring new, and hitherto unaf- 
fected strata of workingmen and peasants into the fight, will 
educate them at the cost of the greatest sacrifice, making them 
hard as steel, awakening a new heroism in the masses. 

We know that it may take a long time before help can come 
from you', comrades, American Workingmen, for the develop- 
ment of the revolution in the different countries proceeds 
along various paths, with varying rapidity (how could it be 
otherwise!) We know fullwell that the outbreak of the Europ- 
ean proletarian revolution may take many weeks to come, 
quickly as it is ripening in these days. We are counting on the 



inevitability of the international revolution. But that does not 
mean that we count upon its coming at some definite, nearby 
date. We have experienced two great revolutions in our own 
country, that of 1905 and that of 1917, and we know that revo- 
lutions cannot come neither at a word of command nor accord- 
ing to prearranged plans. We know that circumstances alone 
have pushed us, the proletariat of Russia, forward, that we 
have reached this new stage in the social life of the world not 
because of our superiority but because of the peculiarly reac- 
tionary character of Russia. But until the outbreak of the in- 
ternational revolution, revolutions in individual countries may 
still meet with a number Of serious setbacks and overthrows. 

And yet we are certain that we are invincible, for if humanity 
will not emerge from this imperialistic massacre broken in 
spirit, it will triumph. Ours was the first country to break the 
chains of.imperialistic warfare. We broke them with the great- 
est sacrifice, but they are broken. We stand outside of imper- 
ialistic duties and considerations, we have raised the banner 
of the fight for the complete overthrow of imperialism for the 
world. 

We are in a beleaguered fortress, so long as no other interna- 
tional socialist revolution comes to our assistance with its ar- 
mies. But these armies exist, they are stronger than ours, they 
grow, they strive, they become more invincible the longer im- 
perialism with its brutalities continues. Workingmen the world 
over are breaking with their betrayers, with their Gompers 
rand their Scheidemanns. Inevitably labor is approaching 
communistic Bolshevistic tactics, is preparing for the prole- 
tarian revolution that alone is capable of preserving culture 
land humanity from destruction. 

We are invincible, for invincible is the Proletarian Revolu- 
tion. 



LIBRARY OF CONGRESS A 

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The Class Struggle 

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EDITED BY 
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